Monadhliath Memories

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A long time ago I was privileged to own a small bolthole property with an IV2 postcode – my own little patch of the proper Highlands. I visited it every fortnight, tended it well, and eventually couldn’t spare the time to keep it up as base moved beyond a reasonable commute distance.

A couple of weekends ago I revisited the area for the first time in years.

Some things have changed: a little traffic-light-controlled bridge is no longer there as the B851 has been slightly widened in parts; some of the surrouding hillsides have been clear-felled of their trees. But otherwise the lie of the land remains largely mercifully untouched. Strathnairn, with its rocky crags and landscapes of naught but light and water, still exudes a permeating emptiness – a present absence – that turns the role of viewer on its head, asking you “so what do you stand for?”.

Of course, my other favourite afternoon escape route was a few miles up the road to the comparative civilisation of Dores. That hasn’t changed much either. The view down Loch Ness is just as impressive, and the solar halo just hanging in the sky was both awe-inspiring and uplifting.

There’s a chain, that binds us all in lives of wonder
There’s a chain, hold it closely as you go
Let this name be your family and your shelter
Take this chain all your days, don’t let go.

Too-Big Data? That don’t impress me much

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On a whim, I spent the evening in Edinburgh at a meetup presentation/meeting concerning Big Data, the talk given by a “Big Data hero” (IBM’s term), employed by a huge multinational corporation with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies (including the UK Welfare system).

I think I was supposed to be awed by the scale of data under discussion, but mostly what I heard was all immodest massive business-speak and buzzwords and acronyms. A few scattered examples to claim “we did that”, “look at the size of our supercomputer”, but the only technical word he uttered all evening was “Hadoop”.

In the absence of a clear directed message, I’ve come away with my own thoughts instead.

So the idea of Big Data is altogether a source of disappointment and concern.

There seems to be a discrepancy: on the one hand, one’s fitbit and phone are rich sources of data; the thought of analyzing it all thoroughly sets my data-geek senses twitching in excitement. However, the Internet of Things experience relies on huge companies doing the analysis – outsourced to the cloud – which forms a disjoint as they proceed to do inter-company business based on one’s personal data (read: sell it, however aggregated it might be – the presenter this evening scoffed at the idea of “anonymized”), above one’s head and outwith one’s control. The power flows upwards.

To people such as this evening’s speaker, privacy and ethics are just more buzzwords to bolt on to a “data value pipeline” to tout the profit optimizations of “data-driven companies”. So are the terms data, information, knowledge and even wisdom.

But I think he’s lost direction in the process. We’ve come a long way from sitting on the sofa making choices how to spend the evening pushing buttons on the mobile.

And that is where I break contact with The Matrix.

I believe in appreciating the value of little things. In people, humanity and compassion more than companies. In substance. In the genuine kind of Quality sought by Pirsig, not as “defined” by ISO code 9000. Value may arise from people taking care in their craft: one might put a price on a carved wooden bowl in order to sell it, but the brain that contains the skill required to make it is precious beyond the scope of the dollar.

Data is data and insights are a way to lead to knowledge, but real wisdom is not just knowing how to guide analysis – it’s understanding that human intervention is sometimes required, and knowing when to deploy it, awareness, critical thinking to see and choose.

The story goes that a salesman once approached a pianist, offering a new keyboard “with eight nuances”. The response came back: “but my playing requires nine”.

Landscape: the approachable end of Photography

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Perhaps a bit controversially, I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the landscape photography genre.

A few years ago now, another member in the photo-club and I were chatting about landscape. He said that he made his images using a large-format 5×4 camera and Velvia film because it “conveyed what it felt like to be there”. It set me thinking: how come I can name a large handful of photographers who all approach landscape the same way: large-format, portrait orientation, Velvia film, tripod low to the ground, rear-tilt for the perspective of a large looming foreground, grad-ND for the sky? Whatever the philosophy behind the approach – and plenty of books have been written about the philosohpy of landscape – it seemed unlikely that such a common approach actually represents an individual feeling. Seeing through the fluff, there was a trend at work, a locus of mutually derivative work – for example, there was rarely any presentation of other films, such as Provia; surely someone out there would have found that a better representation of their feeling, at least once?

My collocutor moved away from the area and left the club shortly after that; I rebelled against landscape and for a while shunned all the conventional advice of the genre: no shiny contrasty light, no wide-angle vistas, no colour, but rather, a “no-light” project, studies of the intrinsic shapes and forms of trees in the woods of Inverawe. After about 18 months, landscape began to resurface – at first, at weekends and other times when I was away from the forest. “Only on my own terms”, however.

A couple of years after the fateful conversation, the ex-member was passing by and visited the club one evening. The discussions were most illuminating: he also had abandoned the whole landscape-by-film scene, and was last heard of favouring digital sports work around the Cairngorms instead. It was satisfying to have caught up and closed the loop.

 

Fast-forward to now. There are phases of conformance in landscape; ignoring distasteful badly tonemapped tripe with excessive local contrast, some sites (notably 500px) feature a lot of over-bright over-saturated images. The past year or so has seen a notable rise in long-exposure work – especially in black and white, some with artistic vision, some perhaps less so. Some of my photographer contacts are now suggesting the time of the Big Stopper filter has passed as well.

Some questions to ponder:

Can one take a camera, follow a handful of guidelines and more or less guarantee coming up with a good result on any random day? (There is no one such magic guideline, but you could assign a score based on the number of things a photograph has in its favour according to a set of rules.)

If so, is landscape photography merely a programmatic sport, a way of passing the time with clearly defined start (Friday nights examining the OS map and weather forecast) and end (JPEG by Sunday night), and how does one express any originality within its scope at all?

On another hand, is landscape something that people should go out and seek to achieve, or is it that what one shoots happens to be landscape?

Relatedly, is a photograph good because you stumbled across it, or because you set out to make it, or because it exhibits a strong contrived personal style?

However it arises, when one’s photography spans several genres – both vista and intimate landscape, other nature closeups and art – it seems that viewers respond the most to landscape. It’s rather like the ITV3 or Channel 4 of photography – “human interest”, where all objects presented are approachable by virtue of being human scale, from boulders half a metre in size to buildings and hillsides that a human can at least radically alter with a suitably large digger. And that brings with it an offputting whiff of mundanity.

I can’t claim to be happy with the answers to all the above; you can’t have it all 3 ways at once.